Just Cause 2

That's just the start. Use the grapple in combat, and you can pull people down off ledges or out from cover, as well as trigger it whenever you need to make a fast getaway, but things really get exciting when you realise you can fire off both ends of the wire. That might not sound like a big deal, but it opens up an entire world of mischief. Suddenly you can attach enemies to cars, which then drive away. You can attach enemies to planes, which then take off. You can attach enemies to telegraph poles and leave them dangling, piñata-style. You can knock enemies out of moving vehicles and tether them to the back, where they whip about in the wind like an old plastic bag, while you stand on the bonnet and riddle them with bullets. Or, you can forget enemies entirely and attach cars to helicopters, in order to use them as wrecking balls, and yet another vista of comedic opportunity opens up.

At the very least, this promises a ridiculous physics playground to explore - a LittleBigPlanet seen through the lens of Jackass rather than Take Hart. And while it's often said that the promise of meaty narratives, moral consequences and characters so real you could kiss them will one day take game design to a higher level, where are all those things when you want to harpoon someone to the side of a truck, like they're part of some grisly charm bracelet, before lofting the entire thing, attached to the underneath of a passing Jumbo, into the fiery arms of a nuclear processing plant?

With these kinds of options at your disposal, the action heats up very quickly. This tiny village, like all the others in the game, has a handful of clear objectives in place - destroying a propaganda bus, say, or taking out a water tower - but it's also a place to stage endless gunfights as the reinforcements flood in, and a distant gas station explodes. AI, never a strong point the first time round, has apparently been improved, but few enemies live long enough for us to judge if they really are better at flanking and taking cover. Who cares, anyway? You can tether a car to a helicopter!

If you need a bit more structure in-between the main story missions, you can always undertake work for the game's three factions. Either way, Panau's busy map is a riot of completion meters, side quests, unlockables and upgradeables, and you're encouraged to dip in and out: once you've discovered a location, you can fast-travel there or be immediately extracted, only to skydive in somewhere else for more nonsense.

And even when you get to the game's central campaign, you won't have left the world of chaos behind: missions give you a central objective, and then mix scripted checkpoints with a freedom of approach. As an example, we're shown a story mission with the simplest of agendas: rescue a sexy agent from a wintry stronghold. Given such a basic task, Rico's subsequent moves look less like the chess-like strategising of a master tactician, and more like a half-legible diary entry of a delusional schizophrenic on heavy medication. Rather than taking a bus into the mountains, Rico opts to grapple onto a passing van, jack it, and drive it over a flyover, before parachuting out the door to land in a nearby air base.

Touching down on a jet as it taxies towards the runway, he takes out a few stragglers with his handguns before - only once the jet's in the air - deciding to hop inside and pilot it over to the stronghold in question. And then, why land when you can crash? Parachuting down to a lofty rooftop, it's obviously time for a fight with ninjas - ninjas who can warp around in a puff of smoke, meaning Rico has to put aside the grapple and rely on his guns again. Then, naturally, Half Past Ninja means it's time for that atomic submarine to bust through the frozen lake behind Rico, and fire off a few homing missiles, while Rico's target is bundled on board. Luckily, by this point, there are Hummers streaking away across the ice, and Rico's grapple can just about reach one of them...

There, amidst ninjas and atomic submarines, surrounded by a gentle fall of snow and the insistent chug of military engines, is probably where we should leave Rico and his game for the time being. It's hard to know how any of this madness truly stacks up until the controller's in the hands of someone other than a designer, of course, when we'll hopefully find out whether or not Just Cause 2 spent longer in Quality Assurance than its predecessor did. And even then, the history of sandbox games is littered with games that were great fun for an hour, but then struggled to entertain over the long haul. What we've been shown so far, however, is unexpectedly thrilling, and even if it is ultimately beyond Avalanche's reach to bring all these promising pieces together to create a great game, given the sheer exuberance of what's already in place, at the very least, Just Cause 2 is going to be a brilliant demo.